


In the Shadow of the Forest

by beaubete



Series: Here, There be Dragons [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-13 21:41:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5718097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the 00Q Reverse Bang 2015/2016!</p><p>Sent to the edge of the world to look for dragons no one believes in, Sir Bond finds something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Shadow of the Forest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [megaikemen](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=megaikemen).



> The 00Q Reverse Bang! I always love participating because there's so much inspiration to be found in the art involved, and this year was no different! All of the art in this fic was created by the wonderful [megaikemen](megaikemen.tumblr.com)! Check out her tumblr for more beautiful work, and the [challenge event page](00qreversebang.tumblr.com) for more wonderful fics and art!
> 
>  
> 
> [Megaikemen's art for the challenge can be found here!](http://megaikemen.tumblr.com/post/137263344755/my-art-for-00q-reverse-bang-dragon-q-and-knight)

Screaming.  The night air is filled with screaming, and with flames.

::

There’s snow falling gently on Bond’s shoulders when he makes it to the edges of the first town—the ashes of it—in early light.  It isn’t necessary to be out so early; this is an initial inquiry, after all, but the sooner he goes out the sooner he can be back.  They’re superstitious nonsense, anyway, these reports the Queen’s sent him haring into the countryside after.  Dragons!  Any dragons in this area are the stuff of bards and legends, no more real than the direwolf or the cockatrice.  If they were ever real they’ve been gone long enough that they might as well have never been; no sane person believes in mythic beasts, even here at the edges of the frayed and straggling ends of the world, nestled in against the forest deep and dark.  There’s something romantic about the idea, though—the known world dropping off suddenly, the borders of the kingdom still lined by mapmakers with the words: Here there be Dragons.

It’s nonsense.  Bond kicks a beam that’s more powder than wood, watching as it crumples beneath the toe of his boot.  There’s nothing here.  No villain, certainly, and no clue.  Not even a single survivor; no one has greeted him since he’d led his small team into the still smouldering embers of what had been a tiny cluster of homes.  A baker’s shop.  Not even a smithy, and this village so small it barely has room for a name.  There’s nothing left, and no one.  It’s all ashes now, half-buried in the thick clumps of cold and wet beginning to pile into drifts that steam in the coals.

  

There’s nothing for it; he climbs atop his charger and she does a finicky little dance, adjusting to his weight as he settles.  Another ride, then, to another ruined town, and yet another ruined town when he finds nothing there, at each place the ashes and the trail gone colder than the last.  This nameless village is the fourth such town, and he knows not three leagues away the nearest village—not more than three tiny houses huddled together against the cold wind—stands empty and waiting for its end; the peasants there had been loading their meagre possessions into carts and packs as he’d passed in the night, their torches like stars on earth in the black.  They’d been stonefaced as his knights had passed, with no tears or pleas for him to find the culprit or culprits, just silent resignation as they left behind their homes for the flame.  

They’re on their third such village when he finally finds something worth investigating.  There, half buried beneath the snow and soot, he spies—“Hold!” he commands, throwing up his hand.  The horses behind him whicker as they’re pulled to a stop.  Bond slides from his saddle again, kneeling in the snow to lift—it’s a tiny medal, a mark of distinguished service.  He recognises it immediately, surprised that he hadn’t noticed it missing from the man’s chest as they rode out this morning.  There’s no way—his horse gives a shimmering cry and that’s all the warning he gets before he’s slammed back to the ground, her weight glancing his shoulder and the side of his chest hard enough to wind him.  For a long, dizzy moment everything is animal heat at his face, hot enough to melt the snow at his back, brown hair and flashes of stark blue winter sky and then that deafening, deafening crack.

It’s not even pain; the hurt is so immediate and instant and deep that it doesn’t register as hurt at first, just a dull ache that throbs with his heartbeat.  His head jerks, lolls to the side just in time to vomit and leave him lying in his own sick, and when he finally manages to drag his head upright, it’s.

‘She trusted you,’ he wants to say; his lips move and even he can hear his own breath whistling in his punctured lung.  Silva smiles.

::

He lies on his back in the cold and waits for death to come.

::

Warm.  Everything has been cold for so long—for days, at least, though it felt like years—that his first thought is that he’s finally lost himself to frostbite, that hypothermia and cold are rocking him to sleep in their gentle, frigid arms.  Except freezing to death has never smelled so pleasant, sweet and earthy and savoury.  Bond tries to hoist himself upright and immediately stars burst in his vision.  A quiet voice tuts nearby, but he can only process so many things at once: he’s blessedly warm, feet bare to wiggle his toes in the gently toasted air.  There’s something cooking somewhere close, the tidy sounds of a kitchen percolating, filtering in like the sound of rain as a storm approaches: first distant and faint, then present, immediate.  He’s leaned against a cushion of some sort; he curls his fingers around the edges and catalogues it: silk, threadbare but soft.  His ribs ache but they’re bound tight, and his arm—panic bubbles in the back of his throat like bile as he realises he can’t move it.  It’s locked against his ribcage firmly, and shifting it brings back every memory of sinew tearing, bone snapping, tissue giving way as he is trod upon and left by the charger he’s reared since she was a colt.  By the time his pain fades enough to let his vision clear, he can see the boy kneeling on another cushion nearby is unimpressed.

“Who—?” Bond asks, but, apparently satisfied that Bond won’t be tugging at his bandages again, the boy turns back to the pot he’s tending.  He’s humming quietly, a song that echoes some ancient thing in Bond’s chest, but he doesn’t recognise it.  Pleased with the quality of his meal, the boy puts aside his spoon and turns to inspect Bond’s bandages.

His clever fingers poke and prod the bandages, thumping gently along the thick bandage around Bond’s chest.  Each tender tap makes Bond wince; he finally catches the boy’s fingertips with his good hand and squeezes until he stops.  Wriggling free, the boy sits back.  His lips are tucked in a disapproving moue, and Bond begins to understand—“Are you a mute?” he asks, trying for delicacy.

The boy snorts.  “Hardly.”

Well—!  Then why won’t—?  Bond’s brow falls as he takes him in.  “Who are you?”

“You could be more grateful, you know,” the boy says instead.  He hums to himself and begins to turn back to his pot.

“No!”  And honestly, Bond’s got better manners, but who could blame him for— “I’m sorry.  You’re right—you must have saved me.  I am in your debt.”

“Yes,” the boy agrees.  He seems to warm to the topic.  “You’d have died if I hadn’t found you, you know.  It was very cold.  You’re lucky to have met me.”

  

There’s something childish in the boy’s manner, open and pettish and demanding of praise.  It’s strangely charming, a match to seastorm eyes and tangled, dark curls.  And.  There’s something odd about the boy’s face, the way the lines of it guide up at the temples; there’s something buried in the thick pile of waving silk.  He’s pretty in a masculine way, dark as a Welshman but for those odd, pale eyes.  Those uncanny eyes.  Bond finds his lips curving into a smile almost despite himself.  “Yes, you’re right.  I am lucky,” he agrees genially, and then: “I’m called Bond.  May I have your name, please?”

The boy looks appalled, thick brows drawing in sharp and pointed.  “No, you may not!”

He’s offended somehow.  Bond frowns.  The boy has no accent, but if he comes from foreign lands—“I apologise.  You’re right again—I meant no insult.  That is how we say it where I’m from: what can I call you?”

It does smooth out the boy’s features somewhat, and as he stares at Bond his face softens further, intrigued.  Finally, “You can’t just ask for someone’s name like that.  You’re very forward, Mr Bond.”  Even so, he shuffles over to sit beside him.  “I’ll show you, though.  I like you, even though you’re not clever.”

“Not clever!” Bond protests through startled laughter.

The boy’s eyes light up in solemn mirth.  “Not at all.  Quite thick, actually.  No manners whatsoever.”  As if it’s so polite to be so blunt, each word square and solid.  They’re almost without judgement, though he can tell from the little smile on the boy’s face that he’s aware of the irony.  He takes Bond’s hand in his.  “I’ll only tell you once, though.  And you can never write it down; I want you to understand the power I’m giving you.”

He’s gone strange and sober now, turning Bond’s palm up to trace his fingers over the sword-callused skin inside.  A circle, then, and a jagged line from the center to the base of his wrist; he imagines the image in his head like an agitated cat turned away.  “What does it mean?” he asks, and the boy shrugs.

“Lots of things.”  He sounds purposefully vague.  “Stubborn, sometimes.  Grumpy?  Sometimes it means sad, or isolated.  To be by yourself.  Last?”  Lonely, Bond realises.  The boy’s called Lonely, in his language.

“How do I say it?” he asks carefully, and the boy’s smile is thin, worn through at the edges.

“It doesn’t fit in your mouth.”

And Bond supposes it wouldn’t.  He has his suspicions about this boy, about the way his curls shift and move around—he tells himself he’s being ridiculous, that it’s superstitious nonsense, that his pain is making him see—he takes the boy’s hand in his own and traces the shape back to him.  The boy’s grin at that is wide, his teeth just a shade too sharp.

“Yes!”  He’s pleased, and Bond’s chest thrums in satisfaction with it.

“It looks like a letter from my language: Q,” Bond tells him, and the boy shrugs again.  Still holding his hand, Bond traces the capital Q on the palm, and the boy tips his head curiously.

“No, that’s not quite right.”

“It is in my language!” Bond tells him, laughing, “And best of all, it has a sound I can make to it.  Do you mind if I call you Q?”

Again the boy shrugs.  “If you like.  It’s very wrong, though.”

A thought occurs to Bond.  “Is that sound rude in your language?”  It wouldn’t do to make up a name for him that sounds vulgar or insulting, after all.  Q shakes his head.

“It’s a childish noise, a teasing sound, when you suspect your friend is in love with someone,” he explains.  Pursing his lips, he repeats it: Q, Q, Q.  It looks like kisses.  Bond laughs again.

“That sound in my language is ‘mwah’.  We do it, too,” Bond tells him, and as he expects, Q purses his lips, repeating the sound to himself quietly.  There’s something sweetly innocent about him; both names are apt, Bond decides as Q tuts around the cooking pot again making kissing sounds at himself.  It brings a smile to his lips.

Supper turns out to be a roasted root soup, lumps of parsnip and swede and turnip cooked into a mashy stew that’s both filling and delicious.  Bond takes his bowl in his good hand but can’t bring the spoon to his mouth with his bad; he takes the bowl in the bad and promptly pours half of it in his lap.  To his credit, Q doesn’t laugh—he feeds Bond carefully, opening his own mouth comically wide to project each bite before he brings the food to Bond’s lips.  He even blows on it before offering it, though by the end of the bowl he doesn’t need to cool it and Q’s own bowl must be cooled and mealy by the time he sits back to eat it. He doesn’t complain, just neatly eats the food in tidy bites until the bowl is empty.  Q clearly considers licking the bowl; Bond’s smile seems to settle it for him and he takes Bond’s bowl away, cleaning up efficiently.  

He gets the impression that Q does this every day only without the company, and when Q settles in near the fire with a sharp knife and an ornate box of wood to carve, he means to ask Q what’s happened to his family.  Instead, lulled with food and warmth and the knowledge that he is, at least for now, safe, Bond drifts off to sleep.  He wakes once, a little dizzy with the pain, to the green medicine taste of whatever it is Q’s dripping onto his mouth from above, the firelight caught on the horns that peek from Q’s hair, on the intense flicker of his odd-coloured eyes.

Q makes a guttural sound, soothing for its alien roughness, and touches Bond’s eyelids.  “Sleep now.”

::

When he wakes, Bond finds he’s rolled onto his arm in his sleep, the pain stabbing deep and thick and sticky as cold honey.  He can’t even speak for a long moment, mute with agony, and yet he must be making some low sound that even he isn’t aware of because Q comes bustling in from the outside.  The armful of sticks he’s carrying clatters to the floor, and Bond’s only distantly aware of the sound of the leather flap over the door banging against the jamb stiff with ice as Q sweeps in, touching his face, brushing at his hair, petting his eyelashes with steady, tender fingers.  He’s crooning, something soft and sweet, as he strokes over Bond’s head and shoulder, perhaps the sort of thing his mum had sung him as a child when he hurt, if people like Q sang to their children.  If he’d had a mum.  The fire in his shoulder recedes, and when Q sits back, eyes dark and searching Bond’s face for any sign of discomfort, Bond reaches up with his good hand to curl his fingers around Q’s.  Q starts, pulling back, before slipping his frigid hand in Bond’s.

“You’re freezing,” Bond tells him.  Q grins.

“Snowing.”  He has the same glee about it the squires do when the first flakes start drifting down from the sky, before the winter doldrums set in and they’ve had to break the ice in the basin to wash every morning for a month straight.  Indeed, there are specks of white sprayed through his dark hair, and there’s a hint of steam to his breath.  Q watches him watching and flushes, rubbing his free hand through his hair.  Bond gets a peek at something dark and solid there—his horns, his mind supplies, and in the light of day it’s harder to pretend he’s mistaken—before the curls pile around them again.

“Yes, I’d gathered that much,” Bond says dryly.  “You’ll freeze to death out there.  What were you doing?”

Q gives him a flat, patronising look before standing again and turning to pile the sticks into a neat stack by the door.  He’s humming to himself again as he stacks, and again it sounds familiar to Bond, a song he’s forgotten, somehow, though he doubts he’s ever heard it before.  He licks his lips.  “Tell me about your people,” he asks.  Q freezes.

“No.”  The blunt refusal surprises him.  He hadn’t expected a confession; truth be told, Bond doesn’t quite know what he expected, but Q’s abrupt and complete denial isn’t it.  He opens his mouth, but Q beats him to it.  “There’s nothing to tell.”

“They left you?”  And Bond could mean anything here, does mean several things—did you hatch here alone?  Were you left to rear yourself?—but he doesn’t mean anything cruel.  Q’s sharp eyes say he thinks otherwise.

“No.”  Then, “Yes.”  He’s biting his lip, and his lashes dip low.  Regret pinches inside Bond’s chest.

“My family sent me to Queen Em’s court when I was six.  They’d taught me my letters and my numbers, and that was enough for me to serve as a squire in the castle,” Bond tells him.  He closes his eyes, and he can almost see the castle as he’d seen it that first time: smaller than he’d expected—smaller than his family’s keep, for certain—but densely guarded.  The stone walls had been ringed in spikes, and there he’d seen his first tarred head.  He’d had nightmares for weeks.  His tutor had said simply, ‘Don’t do anything bad, then’ and left it at that.  “I served under Sir Lee as a page, and for a short time in Sir Brown’s company before being hand-picked to serve Queen Em.  Sir Pierce had left her service, and many believed I was wrong to replace him.  I’ve done my best to prove them wrong.”

Q is faking disinterest, carefully feeding twigs into the fire again, but Bond sees him as he sidles closer, sinking from his crouch to sit on his feet.  He lets the silence hang, until Q peers at him from under his fringe.  He looks irritated by his own intrigue.  “And so—?”

“And so she has sent me here to investigate the burnings, because she trusts me.  We were told it was dragons.”

“It wasn’t!” Q protests hotly.  Bond bites back his chuckle.

“No.  Dragons wouldn’t do that, I think.”

“Of course they wouldn’t!”  

And Bond could tease him more, could tell him about the stories his mum had told him as a child about the big, bad dragons that would come eat him up when he was naughty, but.  But.  Q looks wobbly, suddenly, unutterably sad.  “Besides,” Bond says, carefully reaching up with his good hand to card through Q’s curls.  “Not enough of them around to do something like that.”  His finger hooks on—yes, a horn.  Q’s red-rimmed eyes stare.

“You’re supposed to be scared of me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re _supposed_  to be,” Q insists, as if his fingertips aren’t trembling, folded neatly in his lap.  As if he doesn’t look nine stone soaking wet.  As if he hasn’t spent the last few days taking patient care of him, and if he’d wanted Bond dead at any time—

“I’m not.”

Q’s breath shudders out of him.  He sounds relieved, perhaps, or nervous—“We came here when I was small—”

“You’re still small,” Bond teases, just to see Q’s baleful look.

“Well, yes.  I’m still rather young.  But we came here when I was little, maybe only about thirty years old—our whole caravan came: my mum, my dad.  Everyone.  This was—oh, I don’t know how long ago.  I didn’t count things like that then.  I didn’t speak this language; things like that didn’t matter.”

“They left?” Bond prods gently, and Q sighs, nodding.

“It’s—they weren’t being cruel.  It’s something that we do, something that they were supposed to do.  Little dra—” Q cuts himself off in the middle of the word, flushing.  “Our children.  It’s what we do.  We can be territorial, and if we’re all in one place, we’re easy to kill off.  The wildwood is shrinking, you know—when we first arrived, your queen’s borders, or her father’s borders, rather, were far away.  Twenty miles, at least—a comfortable trip, but a journey nonetheless.  Now I am within her bounds.  Her people’s children used to come play with me.”

A thought occurs to Bond.  “How old is thirty?  If you were like me, I mean?”

Q hums in thought.  “Seven?  Perhaps a little younger.  I’ve seen your kind last quite long, if you have no accidents.”

A child, then, wandering the forest alone.  Bond’s tongue sticks in his mouth, dry.

Q continues.  “They were meant to come back to me, or to send someone to fetch me.  We do a ceremony at a certain age, and then you go off again to find a mate, but you’re meant to see your family again before that.  I thought I might have nestlings.  I might do.  I don’t know.”

“How late are they?”  He knows he shouldn’t ask, but—

“Late.”  Then finally, reluctantly—quiet: “Late.  I’m so much older now.”

Bond doesn’t know what to say to that, guilt chewing his stomach into little bites.  He strokes his hand in Q’s hair and Q hums again, his whole body thrumming like a cat’s purring.  Bond scritches delicately at the base of Q’s horns and Q sighs, curling up against him.

::

He tells Q about Madeleine.

“I have a mate at home.  My second.  Or she was supposed to be.”  He’s been here a month now; their wedding date has come and gone, a fortnight to the day that he left the castle.  Bond smiles wryly.

“She’ll wait for you,” Q vows, and Bond doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s not like in all the stories.  He and Madeleine had been compatible; it would have been an easy match: the hangman’s daughter, unmarriageable, and the man whose wife had run off and left him.  He’d loved the first one fiercely, selfishly, but Madeleine had merely been a good prospect.  She was clever with herbs, and he knew he wouldn’t have to worry about her dying in childbed.  He doesn’t want children, anyway, and the thought had suited him down to his bones.  “That’s how it always goes, you know.  True love,” Q continues blithely.  Bond grins at him and scritches his horns just to see him wriggle.  “Stop it!  Stop; I’m not a little boy.  Stop!”  The whines are almost as charming as the dance that goes with them.

“Tell me a story from your childhood,” Bond commands.  Q ignores him until his fingers still, then butts his head into Bond’s hand like an affectionate cat.  “No, tell me.  A fairy story.”  After a month together, Bond knows this is as close to his family that Q will skate, and he holds his breath that he hasn’t pressed too hard.  When Q makes a sweet, high trill of acceptance, he sighs in relief and resumes his petting.  Q curls against him contentedly.

“Once, as these things often begin, when the Eastern Wind blew Westerly and the Sun stayed out all night to dance with her husband, the Moon, there was a woman—she was a dragon woman, of course.  She was beautiful, exceedingly so, and everyone for leagues knew she was the prettiest of all the gods’ beloved creatures.  Her name was,” here Q pauses, tracing an elaborate mark in the air before them.  To Bond, it looks like the stag triumphant, the symbol of his kingdom.

“—Regina,” he offers, but Q shakes his head.

“No.  Not queen.  ‘The ascent of the first star in the evening’ might be a better translation.”  A lump forms in Bond’s throat.  Vesper, Q means.  She was a beautiful woman called Vesper.

“Venus,” he says instead, and Q stops, thinking.  Bond can see the moment he connects the name with the goddess of love and agrees, nodding.

“Okay.  She was called Venus, as she was a callous beauty, and haughty.  She loved no one so much as the sight of herself in the pond, and she might have wasted away for love of her own perfect image but that one day, as she sat by the water, a man saw her there—he was a mortal man, of course, because he had not yet learned not to approach her, and because he was foolish enough to try.  He had very little sense, as mortal men rarely do, and absolutely no idea of proper etiquette.  Hideously rude.”

Bond’s snort made Q grin and press his head deeper into his palm.  “His name was James.  I hear it’s a common enough name for a common sort of man.”  His ribs quiver with laughter against Bond’s side, and Bond flicks his ear playfully.  “Ow!  James was a brute, too, and a simpleton.  And have I mentioned rude?”

“Mm,” Bond hums, and Q sighs, slinking closer.

“I’m not hurting you, am I?  I’m heavier than I look,” he frets, as if Bond couldn’t lift him with one hand.

“Don’t worry,” Bond says, and he’s surprised that it’s the truth: his ribs haven’t bothered him in more than a week, and his arm still aches in the morning cold but there are long swathes of time when he doesn’t even think about it.  To reinforce his point, he carefully tucks Q into the crook of his injured arm, recently unwrapped so long as he meets Q’s criteria of ‘careful’.  Q bites his lip until Bond rubs his fingers through his hair again.

“If you’re sure—”

“I am.  Tell me more about Venus and James.”

“Well, James brought her gold coins to try to earn her favour.  When he laid his money at her feet, she was scornful.  ‘How pathetic!’ she mocked him.  ‘I have the treasures of dead kings in my cave, and you bring me a pittance.  I should burn down your house.’  So she did.”

“She did!”  Bond laughs.  “This doesn’t sound like the kind of fairy story we tell children!”

“Of course it is,” Q corrects smugly.  “You just tell it from the wrong perspective, with details missing.

“Next, James brought Venus gems.  Beautiful pearls and rubies and emeralds, all to earn her favour.  When he laid the stones at her feet, she was scornful.  ‘How pathetic!’ she mocked him.  ‘I have the prizes of dead pirates in my lagoon, and you bring me a pittance.  I should kill your whole family.’”

“So she did?”

“Of course.  When a dragon tells you she plans to do something, you should consider it already done.”

“Ah, of course.  How silly of me to doubt her.”

“Just so,” Q agrees.  “Next, James brought Venus a parcel.  ‘In here is the most beautiful thing that I own,’ he told her.  ‘It is lovelier than all the stars in the sky that wink at us from the gods, lovelier than the heart of the flame that dances with joy.  It is more important to me than anything else I have ever owned.’

“‘You should know,’ Venus said, ‘that if you are lying about the value of the thing inside, your life is forfeit.  If I do not agree that the prettiest thing the gods have ever created is inside of this box, I will eat you whole, in one gulp.’

“James was not afraid.  ‘Open it,’ he said.  And of course, he was right, and so Venus had to marry James and go away with him to the human village to be his wife.  The end.”

“The end!  How is that the end?”

“Because James won!  He tricked Venus and got to marry her, and they had beautiful daughters who grew up to vex their human husbands and have beautiful daughters of their own who grew up to vex their own human husbands, and so on and so forth until now, when a pretty, dark-haired woman with dragon eyes is probably vexing her human husband as we speak.  The end.”

“That’s not an ending!” Bond protests with a laugh.  “What was in the box?  What was the point of that story?”

Q’s expression is fond, if mildly exasperated.  “A mirror, of course, and the point of that story is that lady dragons are really stupid and willful and difficult to woo.  There’s not really much more to it than that.”  And then Q sees Bond’s expression and laughs and laughs and laughs.

::

Bond realises that he’s healed up one morning when the linnet sings to wake him.  There’s no pain at all in his ribs, and though his shoulder is a bit stiff, the first thing he notices are numb fingers—Q’s fallen asleep on his arm, warm and snug.  

He could stay.  He could; he has no doubt that Madeleine thinks that he is dead, no doubt that Queen Em thinks that he is dead.  He could stay here in Q’s home, this little hovel with barely enough room for the two of them to sit without touching—he finds he doesn’t mind touching.  He’d be happy here, living by the light of the stars in Q’s eyes.  He’d be happy.

But then he remembers the look on Silva’s face, remembers the panic that had gripped him once at the thought of his kingdom being hurt, his queen being hurt.  The decision sits in his stomach like a bezoar, solid and painful.  He works it over as he washes, works it over as he makes Q’s breakfast for him.  He works it over as he collects more branches for their little fire, and when he wends his way back through the wood to Q’s house, he’s surprised to find Q running his hands over the shoulder of a horse—over the shoulder of his horse, the horse that brought him here in the first place.  Her saddle is gone and her hair is long and matted, but she butts her nose against his shoulder apologetically, whickering when he scratches under her jaw.

Q’s silent as Bond goes, and to be fair, Bond could say something, himself, but what is there to say?  He’s the one going, leaving Q alone here for the second time, and even before he’s left the clearing he feels their parting like a missing limb.  No, he says nothing, and Q says nothing, and he rides away.

He’s not surprised to see more villages burnt as he moves out of the wood.  The villages are stark, ravaged ash heaps, but there are tendrils, curls of green and sweet shoots among the destruction.  It takes almost a full day before he sees a single person, and then suddenly there is another, and then another; too many, he thinks—a town has too many people.  They’re noisy and crowding, for all he is just another face in the mass, and Bond finds himself shying away from them like a skittish horse.  At the inn, a stable boy takes his charger and leads him in, but the food he’s offered smells animal, fatty and foul, and even the bread he’s offered is coarse, rough.  He’s become the princess with the pea in her mattress, except it is everything: the wine sour, the women drab, the men’s laughter grating.  He sits on the bed in his room and it is too soft, smells too much like other people.

But the fire in the hearth downstairs is warm, and he can warm his tired bones beside it.  His shoulder aches; he rubs it and thinks.

Perhaps he falls asleep against the hot bricks and dreams.  Perhaps he hears the conversations around him; perhaps they talk of the coronation in a week’s time of King Gareth, heir of Queen Em, who was victim of a foul plot led by her adviser, Lord Franz.  Perhaps they discuss the details of a conspiracy to remove her knights.  Perhaps he hurts to think of her dying alone; perhaps he thinks he could have saved her if he had not been so grievously injured, himself.  Perhaps.  Perhaps he just dreams.

In the morning he is stiff, sore in body and heart and soul.  He leaves his whole purse with the boy at the stable, turns his horse onto the path again, goes home.

“You didn’t eat anything,” Q says when Bond enters the clearing again.  He’s been so terribly impatient—his clever fingers have worried the blades of new grass around him into shred—but he’s waited all the same.

“No.”

“You didn’t drink anything,” Q continues.  There’s hope creeping in at the edges of his voice.

“No.”

“You didn’t speak at all.”  Of this, Q sounds certain, and he must be, Bond believes, or he’d have been gone.  Bond’s heard this fairy story before, remembered all the rules only after obeying them.

“No.”

Q smiles, wide and joyful.  “And I get to keep you?”

It has the feeling of a ritual, something ancient and sacred; there’s no other answer.  Bond smiles back.

“Yes.”

  


End file.
